McCaffery: For Eagles and Kelly, a new and tougher challenge awaits

Eagles head coach Chip Kelly, right, shakes hands with Bears coach Marc Trestman after the Eagles’ 54-11 victory at Lincoln Financial Field earlier this month. A win in the playoffs will be harder to come by. (AP Photo/Michael Perez)

ARLINGTON, Texas — Chip Kelly coached at the University of Oregon, coached there his own way too, leaving it on NCAA probation, rightly, wrongly or otherwise. He coached 53 games, won 46, some of them easy. Real easy. Real, real easy.

“I think the difference between college and the pros is that every single week is a challenge,” he said of the NFL, late in his first Eagles season. “You can look at some of the games you’ve played in college and you may hype them up that way. But in the back of your mind, you know what the outcome of the game will be before it’s played because there is such a big discrepancy.

“In this league, there is no discrepancy.”

That’s been his experience, and by beating the Dallas Cowboys Sunday night, 24-22, he’d had enough of that to call himself an NFC East champion. Week to week, it’s the same, even that 17th week, with its riveting win-or-perish stakes. But how about the 18th week? The 19th? The XXI-st, if you catch the drift? Isn’t that when the NFL turns different, no matter what the coaches babble the rest of the year?

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If it is, Kelly will learn that Saturday when the Saints visit the Linc, motivated, healthy, with a championship-proven quarterback, with a coach not likely to be bewildered by the Eagles’ speedy offense. He could learn it the way Buddy Ryan, for one, always used to learn it, often in embarrassing fashion. He will learn that in the playoffs, the game plans tighten, the coaches brighten, and that there are no cupcakes, as they used to call those over-hyped Oregon opponents.

Not that Kelly won’t be prepared. But in the swirl of an intermediate championship, it was possible to forget a few things. One was that the Eagles had just played 16 games and had beaten only one playoff team, the Green Bay Packers, who were down to their third quarterback.

Yet that is how playoff seasons can develop, even after 4-12 disasters. A team might play its opener and catch Robert Griffin after he’d not clocked a preseason minute, then play its final game against the Cowboys without Tony Romo. And in between, it may snake through a decaying division.

If that is what happened to the Eagles, don’t blame them. Credit them. They could have collapsed, too, when they lost Michael Vick to a hamstring injury, or earlier, when Jeremy Maclin went out for the year. They could have tapped out after losing five of seven, two when they couldn’t score more than a touchdown. But instead of making excuses, they made improvements. It’s why Kelly should be Coach of the Year.

“I imagined big things for this season, but you don’t know,” Jeffrey Lurie said. “My main concern was whether we could shift the leadership from an excellent coach in Andy Reid to an excellent coach in Chip Kelly. Could you accomplish it all in one season? But the entire locker room and the entire organization bought into a whole new way of doing things. That was accomplished a while ago. Now, we are just trying to execute and execute well.”

That’s what every playoff team is thinking: Execute well, then make history. But only good coaches remain, most with dangerous quarterbacks, most with healthy rosters, most longer than Kelly into the development of a program. Nor did the Birds land on the sturdiest limb of the playoff tree, catching Drew Brees and New Orleans, which put up 42 points Sunday against Tampa Bay.

But the Eagles are hot, winners of seven of eight, with a record-setting offense. And it has been mentioned once or twice that they are due for a fulfilling postseason.

“It’s an awesome feeling when you can see how hard the players worked,” Kelly said, “then see how it paid off, 10-and-6, division champs.”

It wasn’t easy. At least it was never real, real easy, the way Kelly had it at Oregon. But it will be tougher, and soon. Because in the NFL, there is a week-to-week discrepancy, no matter what Kelly has experienced. And it often shows, beginning with that tantalizing Week 18.